There are two deserts, according to Desert Magazine editor Randall Henderson:

“A grim wasteland … seen by the stranger speeding along the highway.”

“The other Desert—the real Desert—is not for the eyes of the superficial observer, or the fearful soul or the cynic. It is a land, the character of which is hidden except to those who come with friendliness and understanding.”**

** Thank you, Wildsam Desert Southwest field guide vol. 2

Use of “desert” as adjective:

Ex: There’s an “Open” sign on the door but the lights are off every day and the phone just rings and rings. That’s so desert!

Post offices in either direction, neither has a self-serve machine. People in line will talk to you about being old, the slowness and unreliability of the postal service, and the way things used to be around here.

Mysteries to be solved:

What is that dinosaur-like screeching that happens at sunset across the wash every night?

When will I see that barn owl family living in the burned out house down the road?

Are the two connected somehow?

Is that Vietnamese place next to the Big Lots! any good? (I checked…not really.)

Birds in the yard:

California thrasher

Broad-tailed & Anna’s Hummingbird in perpetual territory dispute

Western bluebirds

Cactus wren, rock wren

Roadrunner

Ravens going ha ha ha

White-crowned and song sparrows

Scrub jay

House finches

Scott’s oriole

Say’s phoebe

American goldfinches

Mourning doves, white-winged doves, doves, doves, doves

Trees in the yard:

Olive

White iron eucalyptus

Mulberry

Palm falm

Manzanita

???

People I watch for in town:

An old man with bubblegum-blue hair

An old woman in the parking lot at Vons in an honest-to-god superhero cape

My relationship to the desert/questions:

I hated it my whole life, because I grew up next to the beach and couldn’t understand why anyone would move away from the water. Away from all that green.

My mother and her friends were so desert. Unpredictable, wild. Yecch, the desert is what I always said. Then 10 years later, in New York, with my mom’s dog dying in my arms from a carefully administered dose of pentobarbitol, I suddenly needed to be here.

Did my mother call me out here to do this? Did her dog’s spirit pass into me? Did hers? I can breathe and think better out here than I have anywhere else. Am I here to remake myself in my mother’s image, if she had felt whole and loved?

Is this what you want of your daughters?

Desert plants identified so far:

Mormon tea

Apricot mallow

California buckwheat

Yerba santa

Cheesebush

Rabbitbrush

Desert trumpet

Creosote

Cat’s claw acacia

Desert willow

Joshua tree

Burrobush

Paper bag bush

Favorite sunset picture so far:

Dates:

What are those dried-up, chewy husks I’ve been getting from the supermarket all these years? The dates here are fresh off the palm, the skin breaks and the inside is like frosting. As Joni Mitchell was trying to say, I really don’t know dates at all.

Wallace Stegner:

We simply need to see … wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to the edge and look in. It can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of a geography of hope. –The Wilderness Letter

he also said:

“You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale.”